As one of the first young people in Australia to own a mobile phone in the early 1990s, I used to try to impress babes with my 3 kg brick—a device that is now holding the left back corner of my man cave in the backyard. I was one of the pioneer customers of Apple’s music download store—a hobby that resulted in a vast library of $1.99 tunes but is now collecting digital dust on the front right corner of my hard drive. Not to brag, but I also embraced online social activities at an early stage. I figured out how to use this WordPress thing all by myself back in 2011. Unfortunately, it took me another year to realise that I actually had to create the content myself (I thought it had an algorithm to produce fake news and I just had to put my name to it).Continue reading →

There are two things a man should avoid doing in life: (1) argue with the wife and (2) renovate the house.

While I have contravened the first rule plenty times since we have been married, no permanent damage has been sustained to-date. Unfortunately, over the past six months, I have also broken the second rule – a grave error that has not only led to even more contravention of the first rule, but has inflicted grievous harm on our financial health.

In truth, I should be grateful. After all, my wife handled all the hard work relating to the renovation, including designing, getting the builders in, co-ordinating the million things that need to come together, and even negotiating with God for accommodative weather. However, that doesn’t mean I can’t engage in a little “bitch and moan” session about the whole experience. Continue reading →

Whenever school holiday times come around, one of two things happen every week night in our household. Either my wife and I do paper, rock, scissors to decide who is going to skip work the next day to entertain our two boys aged 8 and 6. Or we do paper, rock, scissors to decide which of our parents we are going to burden the next day to do the same.

This time, however, we decided to both skip work and entertain the kids up on the Gold Coast of Australia. For those who don’t know, Gold Coast is essentially a stretch of beachside towns in Queensland, about an hour’s flight from Sydney. It is where high school kids go to binge-drink in gaudy bars, small kids go to run amok in theme parks and 41 year-old fathers go to ogle at bikini-clad ladies. Continue reading →

When I was a teenager back in the late 1980s, I came across a documentary featuring Eric Clapton. Clueless about these things as I was at that time, I still very much appreciated Mr Clapton’s music and especially his guitar skills. In that documentary, however, Eric Clapton said something about one of his influences being BB King. At that time, there was no such thing as the internet, let alone Google and Youtube. So I remember looking up this BB King character in the library one day, and was astounded how famous he was in the field of blues and how pervading his influence has been on the modern-day R&B. Continue reading →

Despite being 41 going onto 60 in biological terms, I still behave like an 18 year-old going onto 8 in maturity terms.

I was abundantly reminded of this during our recent family holiday. At all the fun parks, I was often the only adult shoving kids (including my own) aside to get on the best rides. I am the only parent at the resort acting like silly buggers with my boys in the pool. Even during meal times, I couldn’t help but fight over French Fries with the kids, and drawing an exasperated expression of “Oh, grow up!” from my wife. Continue reading →